Remember my last post, when I refused to write a year-in-review listicle in favor of actionable recommendations? Blame it on the cyclical nature of the holidays, but the coming new year has me thinking about self-improvement and resolutions, not just personally but also professionally. As such, I'm going to attempt to shoehorn my personal resolutions into social media marketing recommendations for 2014. Wish me luck.

When it comes to marketing and advertising, I recently realized that predicting is actually not very hard at all. And I am going to prove this to you with this post. So let's start with the five topics I predict will grab headlines in 2015: 1. Agency fees and payment structures. 2. Digital advertising. 3. Sponsorship and event marketing. 4. Consumer insights. 5. Consolidation. Those are my five predicted hot topics for 2015. And how do I know with a large degree of certainty that they will be hot topics? Because I predicted those same five topics in 1995 for ...

On whatever day of Christmas we're currently on, my inbox gave to me 47 emails. 47 people reaching out. 47 collections of words waiting on my response. 47 miniature jobs to do. Some of the 47 are new. Some are old. Some have been there so long that surely they're no longer relevant.

I've written before about why I believe the media industry's future with most brand advertisers will be all about delivering specific business outcomes (leads, sales, etc.), in a predictable, provable and scalable way, not just about delivering a promised basket of media outputs (impressions, GRPs, etc.). The more folks in the business I talk to about this issue, the more certain I am that it will happen.

This is the time of year when pundits make bold, attention-grabbing predictions about what you can look forward to in the coming year. These prognostications tend to be grandiose and pretty much identical, as if everybody attended the same panel at the most recent conference and agreed to write the same predictions. I thought I'd take a different "spin" on things. Rather than simply saying what I think might happen, I decided to predict what won't happen in 2015. So without further ado, here's what we won't see in 2015:

While the social media pundits prepare their "Year in Review" listicles, us practitioners are readying for 2015: the Year of Actions in Social. Nobody loves a good 2014 retrospective more than I do, but rather than bemoan the death of organic reach, I prefer to read the most recent tea leaves from Facebook and Twitter and get ready to spring into, well, action.

Google says 56% of all ads the company serves are never seen by humans. This on top of other reported numbers by the WFA, ANA, Kraft, Mercedes Benz and other, which were all even higher and/or worse. Every client database or email account pretty much has been hacked -- and if your business miraculously has not yet been attacked, it is only a matter of time.

Nearly every week for the past two years, my colleague Geoff Brash and I have coached people to deliver five-minute pitches. We've seen people pitching for money and for customers, for staff and for beta testers. We've seen pitches that are persuasive, funny, compelling, vague, wandering, insecure. With each one, we learn. We learn more about what works and what doesn't. We learn more about what resonates with us and what turns us off. We learn more about exceptions to rules. And we thought it was time to share some of it. Without further ado, here are the five essential ...

Marketing today is radically different from the way it was just 10 years ago, because marketers today depend on two things that were never so important before: data and content. The old-school marketer focused on two traditional axes: the media and the message. In basic terms these refer to media buying and creative. I come from a media background, so trust me when I say it's painful that media has less importance in the world of today's marketing. What I'm observing is a sea change -- and if you can't stay on pace with change, then you tend to get ...